1. Pricing – While SendinBlue is one of the most affordable email marketing tools currently available, you’ll need to be on their $49/month plan or above to access unlimited automation workflows. While not a major issue, this tends to rule out SendinBlue for me when recommending a marketing automation tool to a small business that’s new to automation. After all, ActiveCampaign starts at $9!
AdRoll is a high-performance digital marketing software focusing on retargeting. Founded in 2007, it is packed with features for segmentation, cross-device reach, predictive buying, and social targeting. These tools are what allows the software to collect, analyze, and act on customer data with just a few clicks of a button. AdRoll offers four monthly pricing plans for new businesses, emerging businesses, evolving businesses, and expanding businesses ranging from $300 to $10,000.
Furthermore, the industry evolution towards more integrations and connections between marketing automation software, CRM, social listening platforms, etc. enables organizations to focus on what really matters: their channel-agnostic – prospective – customer and their business goals. This is seen in the consolidation in the marketing automation software market and in the evolutions of the solutions that are mainly about more features to connect customers and different parts of the business while connecting departments (marketing, sales,…) and processes as well.
Email marketing is a great first step toward developing solid communications with your customers and prospects. But once you have moved past one-off messages and have decided to create prolonged, personalized messages powered by customer data, it's time to try marketing automation. No tools better exemplify the simplicity, effectiveness, and scalability of marketing automation software than two of our three Editors' Choice tools: HubSpot and Pardot.
Salesfusion is the all-you-need marketing automation solution built to work for you. With a curated toolset that includes highly intuitive campaign builders, advanced automations and superior reporting, we focus on what matters most to marketers--streamlining campaign creation, understanding engagement, improving conversion, and driving more revenue. Whether you’re a do-er, dreamer, thinker or techie, Salesfusion is the new standard in marketing automation.
The consequence is that marketers begin buying lists of email addresses to nurture instead of generating inbound leads. While it seems like a quick fix, it's not a long-term solution, nor does it create the fertile ground for a healthier, longer relationship with your future customers. In our plant analogy, it's sort of like using artificial chemicals or enhancers to make your plant grow faster. Sure, it seems like a good, quick fix--but it doesn't set you up for future, long-term success.
One of the most simple and effective ways to re-engage an inactive subscriber is to tell your subscribers that you’re going to remove them from their list, but give them an opportunity to opt back in to your emails. Everyone wants what they can’t have and it might be just the thing that makes them feel like they need to start engaging with your email campaigns.

Superior Lead Management. Reach customers at the right time by using their lead management tool. Using Pardot, you can send emails based on triggers such as time, interactions, and other custom parameters. You may also re-engage dormant leads, identify the hottest leads before your competitors get to them, and create dynamic lead category lists for better targeting.

OutboundEngine helps businesses grow by making online marketing simple and easy for everyone. We create beautiful, high-impact marketing campaigns, deliver them automatically and track engagement to show who’s ready to have a conversation. Our platform strengthens relationships with customers, partners and prospects to uncover more opportunities with less work.

That means we should treat them like a real person, not a fragmented self across different tools like email, social media, etc. If we can leverage all the marketing tools, channels and behavioral data possible to paint a complete picture of a person, we can nurture them based on their unique challenges and interests, not based solely on the emails they open or click through.

It opens the door for irrelevant, spammy, automated messages. Understanding that a large database of leads is required for marketing automation to have any effect on their bottom line, many marketers end up buying lists of contacts to nurture with marketing automation. The consequences of list-buying are numerous, but most importantly this spammy tactic produces incredibly low ROI. Along with the cost of buying these lists, sending unsolicited emails to people who have never requested any information from you leads to low engagement and hurts your IP address reputation, lowering your email deliverability rates.
Like any marketing strategy, building an email marketing campaign strategy relies on knowing your audience. That means checking out analytics and social media analytics for demographic information. Once you know who your subscribers are, it’s easy to come up with a lead magnet such as an ebook that will encourage them to subscribe. That also makes it easier to decide on the right content for your email. If you can, give subscribers options about how often they hear from you.
Unlimited Lead Scoring. Are you looking for a software that can easily adapt to the needs of your growing business? ActiveCampaign supports an unlimited number of lead scores, so you can easily accommodate all your leads without having to upgrade the program. On top of that, the system lets you organize your leads according to your priorities or even automatically distribute them to your sales team.
A hot prospect just signed up for your newsletter? Great! Now create a new lead for them in your CRM. Let the software guide them into the appropriate drip or nurture campaign, send a welcome message, and track engagement. While you’re at it, let the software also gather behavioral data and alert your sales team when the prospect is active on your channels. Marketing automation platforms that integrate with CRM do the grunt work for you.
Fixel is designed to enhance one’s marketing efforts by segmenting and identifying website visitors that will likely turn into paying customers. The software automatically segments website visitors based on their level of engagement and interaction, allowing you to target high-value candidates through marketing campaigns, remarketing, and other efforts to bolster your sales and conversions. Its advanced learning engine is capable of discovering and separating audiences based on multiple parameters and over 60 engagement signals. The platform constantly updates its segmentation engine based on detected advanced segments arising from multiple engagement signals, thus negating the need to create and test manual segments.
What should be the time frame between sends? At the beginning, you want to ensure that you do not take too long between sends. Your subscribers have just signed up and are enthusiastic about receiving your communication, so take advantage of that enthusiasm.While once daily is too frequent, you can begin by spacing your emails out with only a day in between. After that, extend the time between to three days. As you get to the tail end of your auto responder, meaning that you are getting to the least engaged customers who have not converted and may mark you as spam or opt-out of the email, begin to stretch things out by five days or even a week. Many email marketing service providers will allow you to also mark days of the week that you don't want your auto responder to send, so you may want to eliminate weekend email sends of auto responders. Email open rates are lower on weekends.
Seamless Integrations. Flexibility is key when it comes to marketing. So, it is best to choose a platform that can seamlessly integrate with software solutions you are currently using or applications you are thinking about using in the future. This way, you minimize the disruption to your business operations and avoid having to implement a new software each time your company’s needs change.
In case of doubt: the customer is expected to be more in control than today. Gartner, for instance, predicted that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of the relationship with a company without even talking to a human. Whether this will happen or not: fact is that the marketing industry and marketing automation continue to evolve and move towards an even more people-centric model, responding to digital signals and customer interactions, rather than heralding a campaign approach. We’ve been moving to a more buyer-driven buying reality for years now and it’s a channel-agnostic phenomenon.
Yes, we update it once a year to keep it relevant. We’ve actually updated it twice in 2018 due to some of the bigger changes in the marketing automation landscape this year. Notably, we’ve included a few new vendors that have become quite popular (Prospect, SendinBlue) and removed some of the older ones that were declining in popularity (e.g. Eloqua).
eSputnik is a comprehensive email marketing solution that features a plethora of capabilities for optimal client engagement and improved conversions in the eCommerce industry. Complex workflow processes can be implemented through the platform’s drag-and-drag workflow editing tool, which allows for email automation that takes into account event-based scenarios and customer behavior. This is complemented by the platform’s intelligent machine learning capability designed to improve the number of opened emails and sales conversions.
Make sales on autopilot. Creating a sales funnel out of an email autoresponder sequence is a widely adopted strategy used by information marketers, but it can also be used by software companies, eCommerce businesses, and service providers. For example, it could consist of a series of educational videos, a sales video, and follow-ups to sell your information products. Or, you could create a sequence of free educational emails, and then invite leads to a live or recorded webinar where you make an offer. For eCommerce businesses, your sales sequence could include promo offers for products your subscriber has just viewed on your website.